Last week, a coalition of indigenous people and environmental groups filed a lawsuit aimed at halting the massive oil drilling project in the Chukchi Sea.

Consisting of the Native Village of Point Hope, the City of Point Hope, the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope (ICAS), Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL), as well as The Wilderness Society and the Center for Biological Diversity, among several others - the coalition argues that the U.S. Interior Department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) should not have gone ahead with it's recent decision to open up bidding to oil and gas companies because they failed to address a number of key issues. It is a failure that seems to have been deliberate. A recent news release by part of the coalition explains that the Interior department, [D6] has apparently ignored warnings by their own scientists that the agency "failed to fully assess the potential impacts of a lease sale in the area. The administration has also been criticized internationally for blocking scientists' policy recommendations in a recent report on drilling by the eight-nation Arctic Council."

One such concern, according to Kristen Miller, the legislative director for Alaska Wilderness League, is "the substantial likelihood of oil spills in the Chukchi Sea," something the MMS admits to, says Kristen. "There is no proven method to clean up an oil spill in the Arctic's broken sea ice, or even to reliably clean up a spill in open water," she adds.(...)